With the dramatic increased popularity in recent years of the fast-food type restaurants, various means have heretofore been provided to facilitate the handling of the purchased food and beverage items by the customer. Such means have included conventional paper bags, folding boxes, foil wrappers, and trays of various shapes and sizes. The instant invention is directed to trays utilized for this purpose.
Most of the more popular chains of fast-food stores are provided with tables and seating for the customer so that a significant amount of the food and beverage items is consumed on the store premise. As a convenience to customers desiring to eat and drink on the premise, the ordered items are normally placed on either a reusable or disposable tray at the service counter and then carried by the customer to a selected location within the store interior or out to the patio benches and tables provided on the outside of the store.
Various types of reusable trays formed of wood, plastics, or metal have heretofore been provided for this purpose; however, such trays are costly; are highly susceptible to being lost, stolen, or broken; in order to comply with various public health and sanitary rules and ordinances, each tray must be cleaned before being reused, and thus requires an inordinate amount of manual labor; adequate storage space must be provided for the trays; and the supply of trays must be continuously replenished because of loss, theft, and damage so as to handle varying volumes of business.
For the foregoing reasons, the use of disposable trays has become increasingly popular. Various trays of this general type have been provided in the past; however, because of certain design characteristics they have been beset by one or more of the following shortcomings: (a) they were costly and difficult to manufacture; (b) they were not bio-degradable or not capable of being recycled; (c) they were inherently weak and awkward to handle; (d) they were incapable of properly accommodating various size beverage containers; (e) they could not be nested with similar trays so as to form a compact stack suitable for storage by or shipment to the store operator; and (f) they required presetting-up before they could be used by the customer.